Al Haribate: A Theatrical Masterpiece
By Pr Lassaad JAMOUSSI
Let's take a moment to reflect on the title of this play. Its value in creating a horizon of expectation is particularly powerful, as it is a title that disorients, being both ambiguous and misleading. "Al Haribate" is the original title, while the French title is "Les Fugueuses" (The Fugitives). But what does "Al Haribate" really mean? Is it "Les fugueuses" (The Fugitives), "Les fugitives" (The Runaways), "Les évadées" (The Escaped), "Les égarées" (The Lost), or "Les fuyardes" (The Fleeing)?
The play opens with a group of five women and one man waiting for a bus that never arrives. They try to continue their journey on foot, but eventually get lost in the streets that lead nowhere. The characters are plunged into a space of confusion, mud, impasses, and walls erected on three sides. As they become increasingly desperate, they start to flee together towards the unknown.
However, their collective flight proves to be ineffective, and they eventually start to flee from each other. The play is a powerful exploration of perdition, fear, abandonment, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and despair. As the confusion of the title becomes clearer, it becomes apparent that it is indeed a story of flight – a flight forward, a flight from oneself and others, a flight from unbearable living conditions.
The Story Unfolds
The various situations in this closed and empty space are like anecdotal stories that take on a powerful symbolic dimension. Everything is a metaphor and allusion to the emptiness of meaning experienced by this group, composed of a cleaning lady, a plastic collector, a substitute teacher, a trainee lawyer, a textile worker, and a factory worker. The bus that never arrives is a symbol of the responsibility of the governing power ("Al Hakem").
The perdition and flight that result from this situation mean that no one can guarantee their employment. The public space is gradually described as a source of threats. Some anecdotes exchanged in dialogue or delivered in the form of stories reveal the violence that permeates interpersonal, intergenerational, and professional relationships.
The Social Body Between Images and Words
These various semantic fields are beautifully rendered through a scenic writing that presents itself in parataxis. Indeed, "Al Haribate" is a play that seduces with the richness of its scenic construction, oscillating between complex spectacular elements and textual discourses charged with social and political references.
The play skillfully alternates between monologues, dialogues with two or multiple voices in spoken scenes, and individual movements, choreographic tableaux, and dynamic choir movements – the latter finding its aesthetic references in biomechanics. All these composite elements, these visual vocabularies, come together in a structure of fresco, in the pictorial sense of the term, where the rectangular space serves as an expressive framework for a multitude of questions and problems juxtaposed, translated by forms, colors, and successive rhythms, diverse, contrasting, contiguous, and complementary.
Masterful Direction
The director, Wafa Taboubi, has demonstrated great talent in mastering the delicate threads of this scenic composition, thanks to the rhythmic variety of visual and sound tableaux – alternating accelerations, slowdowns, encounters, and separations – drawing through the bodies of the five actresses (Fatma Ben Saïdane, Lobna Noômane, Mounira Zakraoui, Omayma Bahri, and Sabrine Omar) and the single actor (Oussama Jnaini) the anguish of loss and wandering in the quest for salvation.
The scenic choice is of astonishing sobriety: corridors of light, a sidewalk that appears in a tableau at the back of the stage, sign panels evoking first the forbidden way, then the construction site, and finally the stop. From the forbidden sense to the stop, the hopes of the salvation path are manifested thanks to a beam of light that goes from the stage to the audience, directly addressing the public as the depositary of the entire responsibility for getting out of the ruts.
Thus, the public is challenged, the fourth wall collapses, and the space of the game and the space of the gaze become one. This stripped-down scenography is in perfect resonance with the aesthetic paradox that underlies the entire play: the contrast between the abstract dimension of the expressive, choreographic, and biomechanical body tableaux, and the dialogued or narrative sequences, pronounced with intensity, where the direct discourse and concrete social references plunge into psychological and realistic representation.
The Power of Collective Images
The evocative power of collective images is nourished by the original music composed by the talented Héni Ben Hammadi. The music is tonic, rhythmic, sometimes strong and sometimes lulling, creating a sonic presence that unites the choir movements and relates them to the audience's pulses. The play thus moves from the antipodes of realism to the confines of abstraction.
A Play Among the Greats
All these components come together to refer to the social reality, the daily suffering of working women and men, lost and wandering, searching for themselves, existence, and dignity. This play, signed by a woman, places the question of gender at the heart of the social crisis without heavily and directly focusing on the sufferings specific to women, and without displaying any feminist claims.
The focus is on the social and professional status of each character, beautifully rendered by the actresses' performances. Fatma Ben Saidane delivers a virtuosic gestural and verbal solo when she pronounces the descriptive story of the household chores she performs daily at her employer's house, her body transforming into a machine that decorticates each gesture and each movement of each task in a repetitive and almost mechanical way.
Another breathtaking scene is performed by Lobna Noômane, who plays the character of the worker on the sewing machine. The story begins slowly and gradually gains acceleration, until the actress's body merges with that of the machine. The moments of individual virtuosity are taken up in chorus, sometimes in burlesque gestures, often in centrifugal and centripetal movements.
The contrast of the tableaux operates a rhythm in a sawtooth pattern, where the moments of relaxation, quite brief, alternate with the moments of tension. The play gains in rhythmic intensity as the characters become more and more embroiled in the labyrinth of this threatening city.
The most dynamic tableau is particularly remarkable in terms of synchronization, precision, and speed: each character crosses a stretch of road illuminated by projectors, cutting, in diagonal, in V, in X, horizontally, in all directions of this space that eventually explodes with collective energy communicated magically to the audience.
L.J.
